Yesterday I mentioned, in
passing, milk jugs. As with anything made by the hand of man, these come in as
many forms as you can imagine, (and probably as many more that you can’t). This
first one is a small EPNS set of jug and sugar bowl. I’ve had them for years;
they more than likely came from a charity shop or fleamarket. They have a
vaguely Georgian feel about them, but I imagine they are modernish – they don’t
have any marks at all, so I can’t be certain.
I suppose logic dictates that a
decorative container for something would reference its source, and if so, it
makes sense that a milk jug should be cow shaped. The earliest examples seem to
come from the Netherlands, dating from the early eighteenth century. By the
middle of that century, John Schuppe, a Dutch silversmith working in London,
was producing silver jugs in the shape of cows.
These cow shaped jugs are now
called ‘cow creamers’, regardless of whether they are used for milk or cream.
Cream is commonly added to coffee, but never to tea (a ‘cream tea’ refers to
the clotted cream served with scones and jam), and tea was first served in
England in coffeehouses. China tea was introduced into England in 1657, but
became popular when Catherine of Braganza, wife of Charles II, introduced it to
court in the 1660s. Pepys’s diary entry for September 25th 1660
records, “ … I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had
drank before …”. As better quality tea began to be imported, its popularity
grew, and it eventually overtook coffee and chocolate to become the national
beverage of choice.
Vast amounts of tea were
imported, and consequently the price fell, and tea became available to all.
Silver cow creamers were popular with the gentry, but in humbler households
cheaper ceramic creamers were used. Mine is a modern, plain white one, bought
in a kitchen shop somewhere – they remain popular and freely available.
Perhaps the most famous cow
creamer in literature is the silver creamer that is central to the plot of P G
Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters (1938). The book is wonderful (if you
haven’t read any Wodehouse, stop what you are doing now, get a copy of almost
anything by him and start reading. I recommend the Jeeves stories, but the
Blandings books are just as good). Also, the Jeeves and Wooster TV series,
starring Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, are faithful interpretations and can’t be
praised too highly. The cow creamer features in the second series.
If you are interested in more cow
creamers, there is a spectacularly good website at Craig’s Cow Creamers, which
has hundreds of examples.
Milk is produced by female mammals to feed their
young. The very definition of a mammal is the presence of mammary glands, which
produce the milk, usually through a teat or nipple (barring monotremes, which
produce milk from mammary glands in the skin), as the primary source of
nutrition for the newborn. Humans are unique in that they are the only mammals
to continue to consume milk beyond infancy. After weaning, the production of
lactase, the enzyme that breaks down the sugar lactose in milk in the small
intestine, significantly declines. Milk passes unabsorbed into the colon, where
bacteria metabolise the lactose, this fermentation producing copious amounts of
gases, resulting in nausea, bloating, diarrhoea, cramps and flatulence. The
majority of humans worldwide are lactose intolerant, and do not consume dairy
products. A minority have evolved to be lactose persistent, and continue to
produce lactase in adulthood. This ability is relatively recent, dating from
the last 10,000 years, and is inextricably linked to developments in animal
husbandry. Lactose persistence is a genetic trait, whereas animal husbandry is
a cultural trait, and is thus the ability to continue to produce lactase is an
example of gene-culture co-evolution. In cultures where animals were kept for
dairy products, lactose persistence became prevalent; in, for example, Northern
Europe, with the husbandry of cattle, sheep and goats. In other cultures, for
example China and Japan, there is no tradition of dairy production and lactose
intolerance remains the norm. Lactose persistence developed independently in
cultural groups worldwide, so, for example, keeping camels and goats in
sub-Saharan Africa led to its separate origins there.
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